swing my heart across the line
by rrrpv
Summary: She's a Nobody with a capital N, working for tyrants of law enforcers in a world covered in black bits of ash, and there's nothing anyone can do about it. But it would be so nice to rewrite the history books, wouldn't it? :: elsa/anna, non-incest. dystopi


___(completed __—__ 11.27.14)___ :: _[combined into a one-shot, as promised. also made a few edits. (still multi-chaptered on ao3 so if u prefer reading it that way...)__] _:: _{playlist: _"tiny anthem"; _the m machine — (i actually really really recommend listening to it. i did write the whole thing jamming out to it. _;p_)}_

:.

_I do not own _Frozen_. You can also find this on AO3_. _cover image by _**laikaken**._  
><em>

* * *

><p><strong>swing my heart across the line<strong>

.

.

_some legends are told  
>some turn to dust or to gold<br>but you will remember me  
>remember me for centuries<em>

* * *

><p><strong>part the first<strong> :: prelude

-—

**arc before.  
><strong>_we'll go down in history_

Death, Elsa thinks, is a lot like breathing.

She watches her memories trek across an old cinema reel, and it plays like something she's viewing through frosted panes of warped glass. One minute, she's drawing in oxygen, sucking in humid summer air and late night breezes. The next, with an exhale, gentle as wind shuffling through leaves, there's a hole in the middle of her chest. It leaks with something red and wet and soft, still hot to the touch, while the rest of her body cools down.

Elsa wakes up in the middle of an ashy medical treatment center, and she's cold and scared and everyone is dead.

Well, Jack Frost is dead.

(He's been dead for a while now.)

::_  
><em>

**arc ash.  
><strong>_mummified my teenage dreams_

The ceiling shivers into view. A bare light bulb and ash stains tremble as her eyes struggle to focus. She turns her head to the side and catches sight of a desk that's cluttered with coffee mugs and sheets of paper and dreams that have been neatly placed to the side.

The air whispers around her legs when she slips out of bed, and exhales winter and frozen breaths. Her bare feet hit the cold floorboards with methodical thumps, a soothing melody of monotone beats that grow light and heavy at predictable intervals. They are the toneless crescendos and diminuendos that are hallmarks of her mundane life. The scent of damp, mildewing plaster and last night's dinner fills her nose, but she ignores it as she sets the water to boil and checks her schedule for the day.

_This agenda belongs to: Nobody._

After all, Elsa Frost is a certified Nobody with a capital N, as much as Nobodies could even be certified. She's just one of the thousands of unregistered grunt workers in the system, toiling slowly underneath a grayscaled sun. Their elbows are buried deep in ash and heavy machinery by day and covered in a thick layer of soot by night. Scrub hard as she will, but there will always be some black residue left stuck underneath her fingernails, wedged deep into every crack and wrinkle of skin and strand of platinum hair until she has long given up being completely clean.

The schedule, then, is her way of coping. It's her way of maintaining _order _in a life of ash and chaos.

It's become a habit, because there's nothing to actually check. Her days are all the same. Though that's not saying much, since they have been so ever since she was booted out of the hospital at fourteen. They have been ever since she'd realized that being a Nobody in the heavily industrialized city of Arendelle leads to lots of grunt work in either the mills or the mines, both of which leads to nowhere or death, the latter being the far more common of the two. In a desperate bid to salvage her future from the horrors of black lung, she applies to work for the brass-covered Artificers in the upper rings of nobility. Artificers of the brutal and callous law enforcement, the modern age Gestapo.

Somehow, she gets accepted. She gets accepted, and she thanks whatever ancestor had been looking out for her, and goes to work in a relatively clean environment. She's grateful for that, at least.

These days, she doesn't work in a soot-stained factory brushing bits of ash off of everything and anything while simultaneously trying to make more bits of machinery, but instead stands in heavy protective gear five feet away from a vat of white-hot metal.

Molding, shaping, creating.

She can think of it as a very twisted art form if she tries hard.

It's not the life her fourteen-year-old self would have imagined, not at all. But she had been young then, and unexposed to the stark reality of the world. Elsa is an idealist turned into a realist in the most shattering way possible, and if there's one thing she learned during that transition, it's that the world is unfair.

:.

Elsa hates the Artificers.

Man melded with machine. Humans crossed with monsters. Elsa knows what the Artificers can do — _hell,_ she makes and designs their fucking impenetrable _suits, _day after day after day — and while she hasn't actually _seen_ them at work in the slum streets of Arendelle, having stayed on the right side of the law even when she had been one of the lowest Nobodies of all Nobodies, she's heard horror stories.

Children suspected to possess special _gifts _are forced to walk on hot coals, before being burned at the stake. Men and women with strips of iron forced around their throats, choked to death on accounts of criminal charges. Beggars extending their hands for mercy only to withdraw bleeding stumps.

But what can she do about it? What can she do about anything?

Elsa constantly asks herself why she even does this.

_(Jack is dead, and with him, he took your soul to the spirits of the dead and it's been with him ever since.)_

And she comes to the conclusion that she does it because it's safe. It's safe and that's all that matters. It's safe if she works for them, the Artificers, because then she works under the extended protective umbrella under the de facto government. Twenty-three-year-old Elsa supposes that she is content with her life, because her days are the same, and there's nothing _too _scary or risky or dangerous about it. Nothing that she's gotten used to by this point, anyway. She goes to work from four in the morning to nine in the night, returns home to an empty apartment, makes a quick dinner for one, and sleeps the night away. It's predictable, it's routine and she likes it that way.

She likes routine.

:.

So of course, the breaking of routine appears in the form of dropped keys and muttered curses. It's a Saturday afternoon on the second of March, and the sky is a rather dirty mixture of marble and dark gray. It cries a revolting mixture of raindrops and ash, and each resounding shriek tearing through the air is a thunderclap that rings in the ears. Elsa has stepped out of the elevator leading to her apartment floor on such a gloomy day, snapping close her white turned black no-nonsense umbrella.

(She doesn't know why she even bothers cleaning it anymore, because every time she steps out of the door the ash will blacken the thin film of fabric once more, until she's cast in the thing dark strands of shadows that filter in through the black powder coating the top of her umbrella in a fine layer of soot.

But maybe it's because she wants to try and maintain _something_ clean, untainted, pure in her life.)

Immediately, she sees a figure right next to her door and glimpses a head of strawberry blonde hair. The woman is hunched over and covered in bits of ashen gray, the flecks even visible from Elsa's position. There are kamikaze tendrils of red glued to her face, courtesy of the pasty rain. A slim guitar case sits next to her like a loyal dog, carefully wrapped in a ragged (ash-coated, of course) overcoat, and scattered around her is a rumpled cloth bag and a small, scuffed suitcase.

Elsa daintily gives her a wide arc, pulling out her scuffed keys and keeping her eyes on her door. She doesn't say hello. She lets off no sign that she wants to be the nice neighbor who gives out strawberry shortcake on the weekends (she doesn't even have any strawberry shortcake for herself), nor give any indication that the woman even exists.

So it is due to Elsa's most unfortunate luck that this redhead is clearly one of those people who will introduce themselves to strangers, even if it carries the very real possibility of getting murdered.

"Oh! Heya, I didn't see you there. I'm moving in next door! So, like...I guess that means we'll be neighbors, right?"

The woman's voice is light and soft — almost melodious, like the mellow notes of a flute. Elsa finds herself glancing at her face, and immediately regrets doing so. The redhead's eyes are wide and earnest, teal like the shades of a glacier in the light of a calm sea with smooth waves. She has round cheeks that couldn't cut through butter if smashed against the edge of a table, tanned skin dotted with a constellation of freckles, and a smile that's much too bright for someone her age. She's shorter than Elsa but her presence seems to tower over the blonde, all cheeky smiles and lanky limbs.

"Yes, I suppose we will," Elsa says quietly.

She unlocks her door and then closes it promptly in the redhead's face.

:.

Next Saturday morning brings about a summer ashstorm, but Elsa is awake at three-thirty regardless, the only human active and moving at such an ungodly hour of the grayed-out area between night and dawn and morning.

Or, at least, she used to be.

There's a tapping on her door, like the sound a woodpecker might make. Grumbling under her breath, she blindly gropes for the handle and twists it without checking to see who it is.

And she stares.

Her neighbor stands there, grinning sheepishly as she holds a small cup in her left hand. She's dressed in pink bunny pajamas, and Elsa wants to scoff at how childish she is.

"Ummm...sorry to wake you," the redhead murmurs, and she shifts from one foot to the other. "But, um, I don't have sugar and I would really like some sugar in my tea. Because, you know, I like sugar. And stuff. It's really good. So, could I, er, have some sugar? Please?"

Elsa stares at her, trying to make sense of her jumble of words. It's way too early in the morning to be deciphering this woman's rambling, and Elsa wants to make the impromptu visit as short as possible.

So, she says slowly: "Sugar?"

The redhead nods.

Elsa grunts and takes her cup wordlessly, heading to the kitchen. She fills it up halfway, and then hands it back to the waiting woman.

"Um, thank you," the woman says. "I'm Anna, by the way. Anna Nystrom."

"Nice to meet you," Elsa replies curtly.

She doesn't give Anna her name. There's no need to.

But Anna is still annoyingly persistent. Every day, at exactly three-thirty in the morning, she would be at her front door with a "good morning!" and a cup. She always leaves Anna standing at the door, always giving short, curt answers, but Anna would still smile and wave and say thank you anyway.

"Stop thanking me," Elsa snaps irritably one day, about a month after Anna has in. Anna raises an eyebrow and Elsa, to her great consternation, cannot decide if it's amused or vexed. "I'm only giving you sugar to get rid of you. There's no consideration on my part, I'm not a good Samaritan, so stop. Thanking. Me."

Anna is silent, absentmindedly tracing a finger around the rim of her cup of sugar. Then, with a gentle smile, she says, "Well, thanks anyway."

She leaves, and Elsa is left leaning against her doorway, head reeling.

Something stirs inside of her, something that she hasn't felt in a long time. She refuses to think of it as butterflies; she's not a teenage girl, but a woman who's tossed aside the notions of love, who's laid all of her hopes and dreams, who works in a tight space crunching designs and plates of metal and trying to please higher-ups who rule the city with an iron fist for what purpose, she isn't sure anymore.

She isn't sure about anything anymore.

:.

The odd thing about Anna is the way she plays her music.

She's not really a singer, and if she is Elsa's never heard her sing, because she never opens her mouth in a song. Rather, she twangs each string on her guitar with a gentle intensity that oozes through the thin walls between them.

She plays all sorts of things from block chords to lone melodies to plucking a single middle C at exactly fifty-four metronome beats for an hour. (Not that Elsa counts or anything.) Elsa doesn't understand Anna's music, because it has no flow, no connecting note between anything she ever strums.

Nevertheless, as Elsa rests her head on her pillow and a devastated, inharmonious version of whatever tune Anna's idly thought up at the moment winds into her ear, she finds that she sleeps a little easier, so she doesn't really mind.

Chance and the very opposite of luck throws together Elsa and Anna together one afternoon when the sky is the type of gray that's almost too flat and dull for the naked eye. In a small park near the apartment complex, there's a bench behind a huge tree that's often overlooked because it's in a darker, shadier corner, even with all that black ash falling down and down and down. Elsa likes to claim it as her own spot, because she's never seen anyone else use it apart from her.

But this ridiculously flat gray stops her in her tracks, a book gripped tightly between long piano fingers, when she sees her neighbor sprawled along the peeling brown bench with a copy of _The Snow Queen_, lightly dusted with a thin layer of ash already, open wide on her face. Anna is sleeping, mouth gaping wide enough for Elsa to pop a very sizable rock into.

The blonde doesn't, of course. She hasn't been that childish for years.

Elsa's about to walk away, because she refuses to share a space with anyone for more than fifteen minutes at a time unless it was completely necessary, when Anna rolls over and happily continues right off the bench onto the ground.

Despite herself, Elsa freezes, mid-stride, when Anna gasps, one hand flying out to catch her fall, and as she blearily tries to figure out her surroundings, she catches sight of Elsa and immediately beams.

"Oh! Oh, hey!" Anna croaks, before Elsa can run away.

"Um. Hi," Elsa says very unwillingly. "...I'm going now, so, bye."

"What? No, wait!" Anna calls out, her voice still cracked with sleep but somehow managing to sound earnest at the same time. Her red hair is mussed, sticking up at the back and bangs flopping over her eyes. "Uhh...," patting the spot next to her, "want to sit?"

"...Okay," Elsa hears herself agree before she can even retract the thought.

She's furious at herself, because it's a bad idea. She doesn't do social situations, doesn't know how to start conversation or laugh at the right times. Hell, she doesn't even remember the last time she _laughed_ in general.

Her world is of metallic curves and gleaming brass and days filled with falling ash that blur by, nothing interesting enough to keep her grounded for any length of time. She goes to work from four a.m. to nine p.m., doing a job that is mind-bogglingly boring yet dangerous, soporific yet suspenseful, and all of that culminates into the fact that it still has to be done. She goes home to an empty apartment and cooks dinner for one. On a rare day, she might go out to the park, or do some grocery shopping for her bare necessities. But it's tedious and it's expected and it's _her_. She doesn't want it to change, too afraid of the unpredictable, and so she spends her life wasting away, a shell of what she could be, but too shy to step out and confront it.

For Elsa, sitting down with Anna, someone a little less than a stranger, is a gamble she's not sure she's ready to take. Anna is unforeseeable, an anomaly, a stray bullet in a round of perfect bulls' eyes.

But she sits down anyway.

Anna is a better conversationalist than her, but the silences are still awkward, stabbed with moments where both are looking away, because they don't really know what to say. It's a terrible, uncomfortable twenty minutes, until Elsa can't stand it anymore and she excuses herself and rushes home.

But a week later, she comes back, and Anna is there again. And she sits, again, and they talk, again, and somehow, it's a little better this time round.

She's beginning to look forward to these meetings. And when she looks into her reflection one morning, she sees something different.

There's a spark in her eyes. Small and barely noticeable.

But there.

:.

It's been two months since Anna moved in, one week since Elsa had accidentally given him her name, and only one day since she's come home to find a few policemen at his door and the landlady crying into her sleeve.

"Are you her neighbor?" a policewoman asks.

Not an Artificer, because this kind of news is below them. They don't ever come unless you've supposedly had a run-in with the law. But at this moment Elsa thinks she would have preferred one of her bosses breaking the news to her in their horrible, buzzing voice, because this policewoman...

...She's brisk, to the point, cold, and it sends chills down Elsa's spine when she hears it. The platinum blonde clutches her bag with fingers made of steel, and she barely nods a confirmation.

"I'm terribly sorry to inform you that the resident of this room, Anna Nystrom, twenty years old, committed suicide this morning at approximately ten o'clock. She jumped off a building. I'm so sorry."

There's a strange feeling in her chest, something like an explosion, or maybe it's the loud shatter of something dense cracking on an unrelenting stone floor.

Or maybe it's a soft crack, quiet, gentle, but no less painful, as her heart breaks into two pieces.

* * *

><p><strong>part the second<strong> :: fugue

-—

**arc rewind.  
><strong>_heavy metal broke my heart_

The days after Anna's suicide are nothing short of distorted.

She continues to go to work, still wakes up at three-thirty in the morning, still makes dinner for one. But these days, she enters reality with cheeks damp, scuffles around her workplace with limbs made of glass and a smile that's nothing more than an upward curve of the lips. Her dinners are colored lumps of clay, there for decoration and nothing more.

Two weeks pass, and Elsa realizes that she hates Anna Nystrom. She hates that damned strawberry blonde for leaving her, hates her for giving her a sliver of happiness, hates that she gave her smiles that were filled with blue skies and cloudless days, hates that she gave her _hope_.

Because for once in her life, Elsa had been hopeful. Her grins had been the same as a shot of alcohol, a dose of ecstasy in which she believed that anything was possible. She made her feel as if her life was worth living.

And Elsa, so pitifully, so _stupidly,_ had clung onto her like a parasitic leech, because she _wanted_ to believe. And then she died, her flame snuffed out, and she's left stumbling alone in the darkness with one arm chopped off.

"Are you okay, Elsa?" Rapunzel asks. Rapunzel Corona, a co-worker at the Artificer design firm and one of the few people whom Elsa didn't mind having a casual exchange with. "You're looking a little tired these days."

Elsa stares at Rapunzel for a while, and then, at the back of her throat, a small bubble of amusement erupts. It comes as a wave of something like cracked lava, encroaching and receding at odd intervals. The chuckle sounds false even to her, tinged with hysteria and dipped in grief.

"I'm fine," Elsa says when it dwindles away, and it's replaced with a hollow sort of emptiness that she's lived with for most of her life, except even deeper than that. "I'm just...having a bit of a downward curve, you know?"

"Yeah," Rapunzel says, and she gives her a sweet smile. "If you ever need anything, I'll be here."

"Thanks," Elsa says. She says it a lot, "thanks," "thank you," always showing her gratitude, except she never really means it. Those words are nothing but pleasantries needed to keep the world sane and polite. "I'll be fine."

But she's not fine. Far from it. She's not fine because she stares at the curling blue design paper on an ash-stained desk and ends up crumpling it into the trash bin. She's not fine because the Artificers are starting to look at her funny. She's not fine because she'd started to believe that there is finally something worthwhile to paint. She's not fine, because her neighbor of two months, Anna Nystrom, less-than-a-stranger and almost-an-acquaintance and on-the-way-to-being-a-friend, leaped off a building as if she had wings, and ended up splattered on the ground surrounded by crimson and scarlet and red _red_ **_red_**._  
><em>

_(From a city colored matte black and blood red, she's seen enough of the latter color to last her ten thousand lifetimes.)_

She misses her. She will never admit it, because Anna is (was) nothing more than a woman who pours (poured) her heartaches and uncertainties into the vibrations of a guitar, who asks (asked) her for sugar every morning at seven o'clock, who always forgets (forgot) to bring her laundry up from the dry-cleaners downstairs and runs (ran) down in nothing but a flimsy nightgown and no pants to collect it.

But Anna's music soothes (soothed) her soul and her smiles shoot (shot) her monochromatic life with a hint of warm orange and yellow.

And she wants it back, so, so badly, because she's selfish and always has been selfish.

:.

Dirty opalescent light filters in through the slitted thin bars of the windows of her office and Elsa works feverishly in the brutal humidity, trying to drown herself in plans and papers and anything she can find. New designs, new sketches, new anything. She needs to go down to the forges to make prototypes, anyway.

The heat is raking fingers of sweat and steam down her spine, caressing every protrusion and dimple in her milky skin. Her umbrella has been tossed carelessly to the side for the time being, coated thoroughly with a black layer of wet, pasty ash, dripping gray droplets of water _plip-plop-plip-plop_ onto the smooth stone floor beneath her.

The Artificers, you see, had decided that her office was to be an abandoned and reformatted prison cell.

Elsa thinks it quite apt, in all honesty.

The sky hangs heavy with a great pall of dark ash and fumes and clouds, as it does every other day, sealing in the day's already oppressive heat. Factories belch pollution and dank gas into the foul air, trailing a suffocating dragon tail of black and red exhaust. Elsa can still remember what it's like to live outside in all of that muck and she doesn't miss it, one single bit.

The streets are made not of brick or dirt, but of red-black, choking clouds. Ash and the dark red fumes spat out as crimson crocus residue, mixed together to form a dense, soupy layer of filth and pollution.

Yet they are awash with sight and sound; a thrumming, sweltering hive populated by the Artificers, two-legged insects in rainbow colors, brass reflecting the sun and sun reflecting brass, and then...basically everyone else._Everyone else_ being the influx of people striding out on the streets, pretending not to notice the tall Artificers but still slightly quickening their pace when they pass by the cyborgs anyway, heads bowed down and shoulders hunched over, always speckled with bits of falling rain mixed with ash.

Layers of social sidewalks heap on top of one another in a rickety stack, brick smashed upon cracking brick, social status upon social status. Merchants from far-off lands (why in the world they would want to trade with Arendelle, whose every bit of merchandise was caked with ash in some way, shape, or form, Elsa doesn't think she'll ever find out) with fat bellies and even fatter purses line the streets in stalls with flapping overhead cloths, hollering out sales and products to the uninterested passerby. Regular citizens with their modest lives and honest money. Nobodies, hacked roughly out of the Arendellian social system, sweltering in streets and clad in mucked, heavy overalls, arms up to their elbows completely colored matte black from either the mines or the mills, the rest of their bodies covered in spots of black flakes that will eventually stain their skin a permanent, pallid gray color. Beggars in the gutters, fighting with the sharp-toothed rats for table scraps that have been carelessly left behind in tipped plastic garbage pails. Countless figures roughly jostling each other in the oily haze, none of them paying any attention to anyone else, not giving them the slightest heed.

She remembers exotic scents and rippling heat drifting up from the distant marketplace, always over-shadowed by sputtering motors and crocus exhaust spilling from the engines of the sky ships, the automobiles, the rail yards, the vast, smoking crocus refinery. Elsa always finds herself gagging whenever she is downtown. The myriad smells and colors mixed with that oily stench of burning crocus are especially strong, and more than enough to make her stomach turn.

The skies of Arendelle are no better. A pall of industrial fumes hangs perpetually in the air, bubbling in dozens upon dozens of oily black streams from the exhaust pipes of the multitude of metallic sky ships, populated by insectoid Artificers, that are floating above. Cigar-shaped canvas balloons with rusted metal exoskeletons fill the sky. Their inflatables are slung with the long hulls of wooden frameworks, their holds full of brass human cyborgs and prisoners from all corners of the sprawling city, trade goods and the precious fuel of the metropolis, crimson crocus, transported from the fields.

And here she is: working behind the scenes, helping to fuel the misery and chaos that runs rampant throughout Arendelle, helping the very authority figures that enforce the terror and fear that sink into every crack of every sidewalk of every building.

But at least she knows why she does it.

At least she knows why she's begun it and why she's stuck with it, and it isn't one hundred percent the "because it keeps me safe" reason now, either.

:.

There's a tapping on her door the next morning, like the sound a woodpecker might make. Grumbling under her breath, she blindly gropes for the handle and twists it without checking to see who it is. Because it's three-thirty in the morning, and Elsa is too exhausted to wonder who it could be.

She opens the door.

And she stares.

Anna stands before her, clothed in pink bunny pajamas, grinning sheepishly, and she is holding a small cup in her left hand.

"Ummm...sorry to wake you," she murmurs, and she shifts from one foot to the other. "But, um, I don't have sugar and I would really like some sugar in my tea. Because, you know, I like sugar. And stuff. It's really good. So, could I, er, have some sugar? Please?"

Elsa stares at her, blinking furiously.

She doesn't dare to believe.

She doesn't _want_ to believe, because...this can't be happening.

This _isn't possible._

"Anna?"

Anna furrows her eyebrows, cocking her head. "How do you know my name? I only moved here yesterday."

Elsa's mouth is numb, and she's holding onto her door frame as if it's the single fraying thread attaching her to her dear life. "You — you are _dead."_

The words tumble out past her lips in a jumbled mess, breaking before they hit the ground.

"I...am?" Anna looks down at herself. "Are you okay?"

"I — no, _no_, are you a ghost? Because you — you're supposed to be dead," Elsa whispers. She staggers back into her room, leaving her door ajar, and Anna peers in worriedly.

"Listen, if you don't want to give me sugar, that's fine. I'll just, uh, go somewhere else," Anna begins quietly, a note of unease clearly crawling into her tone as an unwanted parasite.

"No, no, _no, _you don't understand. You. Are. _Dead!"_ Elsa almost screams, jolting out of her stupor and lunging out of her room. "You're supposed to be _dead!_ You died on the fifth of May, at nine fifty-four in the morning, because you committed suicide. You leaped off the top of a building and there was so much _blood_. You — are — _dead."_

Somewhere in the back of her mind, Elsa is aware that she sounds like a raging madwoman, but she can't and _won't_ care right now because _Anna committed suicide on the fifty of May, at nine fifty-four in the morning, and she is supposed to be dead right now._

"But — but it's only the third of March," Anna stammers, her eyes stretched wide and confused. Her cup is trembling violently in her grasp.

_"...What?!"_

Elsa scrambles for her phone, checking the date. Sure enough: March third.

"...This doesn't make any sense."

Anna looks as if Elsa has kicked her in the face. "I...alright. Alright. Fine. That's okay. I...please, I'll just — I'll just go now. Thanks anyway."

Elsa hears her footsteps grow dimmer, and the familiar phrase _thanks anyway_ burns like fire in her throat. She spends the rest of the day curled up on her bed, skipping work (and she'll no doubt pay the consequences for _that _tomorrow), checking the date over and over and over again.

It never changes, and _March 3_ continues to wink ominously in her mind when she finally turns into a fitful sleep.

:.

She wakes up the next morning, and immediately looks at her phone.

The fourth of March.

March 4.

A stone plummets into her stomach.

She goes to work, and it's exactly the same. _Everything is the same._ At nine o'clock, Rapunzel drops a stack of papers that ends with the boss, direct underling to the Artificers, yelling at her. At ten-thirty, there is a slight commotion because Merida receives red roses from a secret admirer. Elsa is given the exact same duties as she was given the first time March fourth came around, and her boss calls for coffee at exactly two minutes later than he usually does.

So of course, the breaking of routine occurs with a _whirr_ and the sound of gears clicking into place. The sound of one of her high supervisors, an Artificer who goes by no name, stops her at her office.

Like all its brethren, the Artificer is encased head to foot in a brass-colored suit, studded with fixtures and gears and spinning clockwork, shielding it from the pollution the rest of the populace breathes in daily. Its helmet is insectoid, all smooth lines and sharp curves. A cluster of metallic tentacles spill from its mouth, plugged in via bayonet fixtures into the various contraptions riveted to its outer shell: breather bellows, fuel tanks, and the mechanism that every Artificer wore on its chest. The device resembles an abacus that has been dipped in sticky glue and rolled around in a bucket of capacitors, transistors, and vacuum tubes.

Elsa is working on another blueprint and nearly leaps out of her skin at the sensation of heavy metal settling heavily down against her shoulder.

Frazzled, she gasps, "I'm sorry, I didn't — good morning, sir!"

The Artificer only looks at her, expressionless as metal generally is. It clicks a few beads across the abacus's surface, staring at Elsa with glaring red, faceted eyes. Crystalline reflective mirrors glowing, gaskets pumping, metal encasing its heart in a machine, dry screeching gears and flesh molded together into one sentient being.

And she should know what most people don't (that there are rivets implanted within the Artificers' bodies, where the metallic suits bolt into place and mix metal with bone and blasphemy with flesh), considering that she'd helped to make them herself.

"Ms. Frost," it intones, its voice a rasping buzz that grates on the ears, "are you alright?"

It is such a bizarre question to hear from one of her employers — employers who, Elsa has to remind herself after a moment of stunned mental blankness, have killed children and mutilated beggars all in the name of authority and proper social conduct — that she can feel herself turn white as a sheet.

"Y-yeah. I mean, yes. Yes, I'm fine, sir."

"...Hmm."

The sound is nothing more than a rusty screech, metal screeching against metal.

"Remember who you are," it says finally, cryptic as a code written in a foreign language, and then it clanks away, pistons still pumping exhaust into the air.

Elsa collapses into her chair.

"Oh my god," she murmurs to herself.

She returns home in a stupor, only to find herself face to face with Anna as soon as she steps off the elevator.

"Hey," Anna says. The redhead has clearly been waiting for her, leaning against her door with hands shoved into her pockets. "Um, can — can I talk to you?"

"Sure," Elsa says, while her mind screams a resounding _"no,"_ and she follows Anna into her apartment.

She's out of place there. Her presence seems to soak up the room, like she's too big to be contained within these small four walls. As if she's meant for bigger and better things.

"About yesterday —"

"I'm sorry about that," Elsa cuts in. They stand opposite each other, and it's like there's an invisible barrier between them, a fence that stretches high, electric and untouchable. "I don't know what came over me."

"No, no," Anna says hastily, waving her hands. "I just, well. You said that I was dead? That I committed suicide on the fifth of May this year?"

A cold tendril of ice creeps into Elsa's veins.

"No, I — no, forget what I said. I was just blabbering, I got you confused with someone else —"

"Because I was thinking of committing suicide," Anna murmurs, and she says it so quietly that Elsa almost doesn't hear her, "on the fifth of May."

Something shatters into irreparable and ragged pieces that moment.

_"What?"_ Elsa breathes. The air is stagnant, heavy with a secret that is almost impossible to bear. In this moment, as Anna lifts her head to look at Elsa directly in the eyes, it's as if she is looking into a pain that she will never truly understand, a churning black hole that sucks everything in, even light itself.

"I'm dying anyway," Anna says, lips twisting up into a cruel smile that has absolutely no place whatsoever on her face, and she sharply raps her head. "Brain cancer. A tumor, I mean. I have, I don't know, three years or something left? Suicide would make it quicker, less painful."

"...I'm sorry," is all Elsa can say.

Anna laughs, and it's so bitter and icy. It's the laugh of a woman who is losing everything in life, watching it slip through the gaps in her fingers without being able to do anything about it.

And Elsa well knows that feeling.

"What for?" Anna asks finally, when the echoes have faded away, and shadows are creeping up upon her skin. "What for, Elsa?"

Elsa doesn't reply, and Anna fades back into the groping tendrils of darkness that reach from her room.

:.

Elsa doesn't know why time has suddenly turned back. She doesn't know why it's come back to the day Anna had knocked on her apartment door, asking for a little cup of sugar.

But she recognizes this as a second chance, a way to save Anna Nystrom from herself.

And she's going to take it.

:.

One day, Elsa wakes up with a start before her alarm clock does, and this is strange because Elsa wakes up at three-thirty in the morning on the dot every single day. She wakes up not a minute too late nor too early.

But it is three twenty-nine a.m., and the breaking of routine occurs in the form of soft white flakes that fall to the ground slightly quicker than ash ever did.

There is a surprising series of knocks sounding from her door and Elsa opens it without bothering to check who is on the other side.

"It's snowing," says Elsa instantly, deadpan.

It _never_ snows in Arendelle. It's always droughts and heat waves and warm rain that does nothing to bring relief from the already humid, clogged atmosphere of the city, brought upon by the choking greenhouse fumes of crimson crocus and ashfalls.

Anna hums softly, hands stuck in her pockets, a rare smile pulling her rosy lips up into a curve.

"Heh...well...I do love snow."

:.

It turns out that snow is nothing more than cold and white ash.

::

**arc storm.  
><strong>_come on, come on and let me in_

Saving Anna Nystrom is one of the hardest things Elsa has ever done.

"What do you want?" Anna asks dully when she opens her door to a fidgeting Elsa. In the other timeline, Anna had been happy, like a bumblebee in spring, or a puppy excitedly greeting its owner. In this timeline, however, Anna is sad.

Sad and cynical.

It's very hard to describe, really. She's sad, not just emotionally, but physically as well. Her thin limbs weigh down, made of eggshells and porcelain, a smile of plastic and a crystal laugh that always sounds as if she is about to burst into tears. Elsa used to think that Anna's eyes were pretty and delicate, but now she's not so sure. In this reality, Anna's eyes are the complete opposite. The blue is nothing more than a flimsy shade that hides the turmoil within. They are black, helpless, and angry at the world.

"...I brought you some sugar," Elsa responds complacently, and she holds up the container.

Anna stares at her for a long time.

"I don't need you feeling sorry for me," she says at last. Her voice is brittle and about to snap.

"I'm not," Elsa says coolly. "I'm making amends."

Between them, there is a space that neither dare encroach. More than a personal bubble, it's a wall, a line that can't be crossed, for reasons unknown.

They stand there for an eternity, maybe more, until Anna steps to the side, allowing a space that only Elsa can fit through.

She enters.

The strawberry blonde's apartment is bare, with only a desk, a mattress, and a music stand occupying the space. Even so, it seems like the smallest thing to Elsa, as if Anna realizes that she won't be here long enough to make it home.

"You play." Elsa nods to the guitar abandoned on the mattress. It's not a question, but a dare. A step forward, a judgment.

As if she knows, Anna picks up the guitar and strums it gently. A discord fills the air, before Anna rights herself and plucks a series of random chords. Minor G: a soft, glowing vibration. Then, with a placid shift of fingers barely noticeable, the C major chord sings out, the most basic of the basics. With a finalizing flourish, Anna ends it with a dissonant slam, and the sound cuts off abruptly as she all but throws the guitar back on the mattress.

"It's beautiful," Elsa says, and the comment hangs heavy, a lie bathed in truth.

"I play down at this bar every Thursday and Friday night," Anna says. The words are muffled, seeping through an arm that has been thrown over her face.

"I'm Elsa," Elsa says in response.

Anna chuckles, and there's an undercurrent of sourness underneath.

"Hi, Elsa," she says, and Elsa gets the strangest feeling that Anna is reciting lines that she's practiced one million times already. Words that she has repeated so many times that they have lost all meaning. "I'm Anna Nystrom, and I'm dying of brain cancer, but I still want to become a musician who can perform on a stage lit with a thousand blinding lights and reduce my audiences to tears with a mere strike of a note."

"...Hello," Elsa says softly, and she doesn't know why she's playing along with Anna Nystrom's game. The words are raw and frail, because she's never said this out loud to anyone before, "I'm Elsa Frost, and I left my dreams on my study desk seven years ago, placing them aside because a future as someone who is a no one is the worst kind of fate anyone can live, so I'm now an architect and mechanic for the Artificers who is nothing in the grand scheme of things. Just a tiny little pebble at the bottom of the riverbed. Easily thrown away and disposed of. And I'm afraid of failure."

:.

Things get a little easier after that. Not by much, but enough. Elsa still goes to work from four a.m. to nine p.m., making coffee for bosses who are too tired to actually care and sometimes staying overtime to finish off work she would otherwise be fired for if not complete. But now, she returns home to an empty apartment for half an hour, makes dinner for two, and then heads next door and lets herself in with the spare key underneath the pot plant that separates their rooms.

Anna doesn't welcome her intrusion, always glaring up at her with eyes that are furious and burn with a rage that could ignite the fires of hell.

But she still eats the food, under Elsa's watchful eye. And when she grudgingly finishes, Elsa smiles slightly at her and says, "Thank you."

Mid-April, Elsa chances upon the bar that Anna plays at one windy night. _The Snuggly Duckling_ is printed in stark, rigid font at the front.

As she enters, a tune flows out, a melody of twisting notes and drowning rhythms. It's the opening bars of a piano piece that she doesn't recognize. She steps in, sees Anna's familiar back at a small piano to the corner, and she thinks that it isn't right, because such beautiful music shouldn't be shoved to the side like a cheap street performance.

Each press is a sound that carves an ache in her bones. It snakes through the air, coils of G's and E's and B flats and A's, combinations of minor sevenths and major seconds and a final C sharp that tenses and then resolves to a D. But underneath it all, there is a painful screech to the notes, a dissonance that croons of a clash between a white and black key that live side by side.

It's a very tender reflection of Anna, Elsa realizes. And, like on cue, the piece finishes, and the tantalizing final notes fade away into silence. No one claps, because her music is nothing more than background sound, and Elsa thinks that that is one of the saddest things for a musician to live with.

So Elsa, in her slightly loose work clothes, pockmarked with charred holes from the times excess sparks had eaten their way through worn cloth, in heavy black combat boots and minimal make up — Elsa claps for her. Anna perks up, looks around, and the happiness in her eyes is so indescribably encouraging that Elsa feels a little bit of her soul being snatched away.

Her blue-green _(blue black green gray blue)_ eyes fall on her, and she smiles faintly. Elsa is surprised to see something so genuine on her neighbor's expression, and her own lips curve in response. For a second, Anna's face narrows, eyes turn icy blue, soft curves turn to high cheekbones, freckles fade into milky white skin into nothing, and her hair turns bright white.

And then the illusion passes, and it's forgotten.

"What's the piece called?" Elsa asks her, as they sit at a table nursing soaring glasses of alcohol. Another musician has taken Anna's place, and she plays a melody of daisies and petunias and sweet, sweet roses.

"Don't know," Anna shrugs, downing her drink in one go. "I composed it myself, but I haven't named it."

Elsa hums. "It's lovely."

Anna smiles at her again, and up close, Elsa starts when she notices that the redhead's smile is just something synthetic shaped into beaming lips. It's not genuine at all.

But then again, maybe it wasn't even genuine in the first place. Up close, in the dim lights and murmuring voices and spirals of piano, with Anna's fake-real grin set firmly in place, she is a marionette with her strings snipped and mouth gaping uncontrolled, forever wide open in a smile that's been a smile for so long, it's merely a show of teeth.

"Thank you," Anna says, and blinks up with large teal eyes framed by long lashes, and she smiles lightly, once more.

_(She is a bag of drying flesh with punctured lungs and a wet, beating heart.)_

:.

They walk home together, though, underneath Elsa's white umbrella turned black and gray by the day, in the warm and sticky rain, mixed together with dark bits of moist ash and cold tar.

_(She blinks once and she's walking alone, hands clutched tightly onto the arched handle of her umbrella, and she blinks again and Anna shivers into existence once more, emerging from the curtain of dripping black rain besides her.)_

She allows herself to smile.

:.

Elsa sometimes has nightmares, and they start the same way every single time.

The ceiling shivers into view. A bare light bulb and ash stains tremble as her eyes struggle to focus. She turns her head to the side and catches sight of a desk that's cluttered with coffee mugs and sheets of paper and dreams that have been neatly placed to the side.

The air whispers around her legs when she slips out of bed, and exhales winter and frozen breaths. Her bare feet hit the cold floorboards with methodical thumps, a soothing melody of monotone beats that grow light and heavy at predictable intervals. They are the toneless crescendos and diminuendos that are hallmarks of her mundane life. The scent of damp, mildewing plaster and last night's dinner fills her nose, but she ignores it as she sets the water to boil and checks her schedule for the day.

_This agenda belongs to: Nobody._

There's a tapping on her door, like the sound a woodpecker might make. Grumbling under her breath, she blindly gropes for the handle and opens it without checking to see who it is.

A woman stands before her, strawberry blonde hair flopping into her eyes and mouth stretched into a wide, easy grin.

For a second, her mind draws a blank. But then, it all comes back to her at once, and her dead expression splits out into a smile. She laughs and says, "Good morning, Anna!"

The name slips off her tongue, smooth and easy, as if it was always meant to be.

"Morning, Elsa!" Anna chirps. She's holding the morning paper and two croissants in her hands. "Have you made coffee?"

"I just woke up," Elsa groans, but drags herself to the kitchen counter to pull out the coffee beans.

As Anna sets the water to boil, Elsa catches sight of a section of cutout newspaper that's scrunched up between a blue folder and the wall. She doesn't know why, but she smooths it open, and it's yellowing and the ink is fading, but it's still legible.

WOMAN JUMPS OFF BUILDING

She remembers this. It's like a far-off dream, words spoken to her through a sheet of water. Something cold settles in her bones, manifests into a type of dread she doesn't know why she's feeling.

"But — time went back," Elsa says in confusion.

"Hmm?" Anna peeks over her shoulder, and Elsa quickly flips the paper down.

"Nothing," Elsa says. She's willing her voice to stay even, but it's as if an arctic wind has frozen her joints.

Anna Nystrom, twenty, committed suicide  
>on May 5. She jumped off her apartment building, and died<br>at approximately 9:54 in the morning.

Elsa will turn to look at Anna, who had _just_ been stirring two mugs of coffee, humming a tuneless song underneath her breath, but when she turns, everything is silent and Anna is gone.

And then she'll wake up with thin sheets tangled around her legs, sweat matting blonde hair to her forehead, with silent salty tear tracks curving down her cheeks.

:.

"Why don't you apply for treatment?" Elsa asks one day. They sit together on Anna's mattress, watching some old twenty-first century movie _Mean Girls _on her laptop because Anna hates action, Elsa hates sappy romance, and they both can't deal with anything other than comedy.

Anna doesn't answer, and at the part where the Plastics enter the movie, she says, "Money. And it probably won't work anyway. Besides, it's not like I have anything to live for."

Karen Smith is informing Cady very seriously that _"on Wednesdays, we wear pink."_

"My older brother committed suicide when he was eighteen," Elsa says suddenly. Her eyes are glassy, mouth set in a line so straight, and she's staring a hole right through the screen. "His name was Jack."

Anna doesn't look at her. "I'm sorry."

"I don't know why. He was fine. He was _fine._ I swear he was fine," Elsa continues, and she's beginning to babble, and she has to stop now or she'll say something she'll regret. "Just — he just — shot himself in the chest one day. I — I found him with a bullet in his chest and the gun in his hand. Left a note, but all it said was _I'm sorry_."

The floor creaks as Elsa turns onto her side. The movie continues to play. Anna is silent.

The night passes without either of them noticing.

The next morning, when sunlight clothes the room in jaundice and birdsong, Anna asks Elsa, "So...exactly _why _are you working for the Artificers?"

A narrow set of shoulders lift up. It's a shrug that's thin and broken. "Because I don't have any other choice. I'm a Nobody and it's safe. I get good money from it."

"You're not a nobody," Anna says bluntly, and it's phrased as _nobody _with a lowercase n. "And what I mean is, like...do you _enjoy _it?" Anna presses onward, relentless as an incoming tidal wave, sweeping up every foreseeable object in its path. "You just, like, started one day?"

"I started because it will help me survive," Elsa says flatly, and the words sound so disgustingly selfish when they leave her mouth that they fall like jagged shards of glass, cutting past flesh made of marble and stone and into a beating wet heart on their way.

Anna looks slightly unimpressed and she fiddles with the peeling soles of her black, ragged trainers.

"And isn't that how all things start?" Elsa shoots back, and she doesn't really know why she's getting angry. "You started playing music because it sounded nice. The teenage girl falls in love with her celebrity because he's handsome beyond measure. The baker started baking because bread smells heavenly right out of the oven, and the taste is indescribable. I create, I sketch, I design because the texture underneath my fingers is relaxing and calming, and I can manipulate the metal into whatever I want, be it for fucking Artificers or for myself. How thin it is, how thick it is, I control it. And for most of my life, I was out of control, and this _job_ gave me a means to take hold of it."

She's slightly breathless when she finishes, hands curled into hard balls of steel.

"I see," Anna says, and her voice is horribly flat. She's turned away, blue (black-cyan-green) eyes veiled with a sort of sadness that's a mixture of nostalgia and misery. "At least you know why you started. I don't know, I don't even know _why. _Just that in the end, I want to stand on a stage and die on a stage."

She draws a ragged breath, running guitar-trodden fingers through hair that's strawberry blonde and streaked darkly with the remains of damaged thoughts.

"But I can't, you see? I can't. I can't. I _can't._ I'm_ dying,_ Elsa. I'm fucking _dying,_ and" — Anna turns away now, her breath hitching — "I'm not ready to die."

Elsa has no words to say. She doesn't know what she can do to make this better, because Anna is dying and she can't stop it because she's not any kind of god and she has no powers, no nothing, except for a bag of sugar and a half-empty jar of feeble words.

"Then — _um_ — just" — _oh, god, Anna, please don't throw yourself off a building because I can't lose you again _— "make the most of your remaining time," Elsa says, rather lamely.

There is a loud and sudden explosion of laughter. Anna curls up on her bed, holding her sides as she laughs so hard that tears leak from the corners of her eyes. It almost looks as if she's crying, but Elsa pretends she doesn't notice.

"Oh, man, if I had a dollar every time I hear that," Anna says in between bouts of cracked laughter, wiping the tears off of her face. She chuckles once more, and it's hard to listen to it pour from her mouth in shocking peals of falsified hilarity, a mirthless cackle that belongs to a desperate woman. "Wow, ten points for originality right there."

"Shut up," Elsa mumbles. "I...I just wanted to help. What else am I supposed to say?"

"Well, for one — say that you'll cure me," Anna says jokingly, affectionately sinking her knuckles into Elsa's bicep, but neither of them laugh. "Say that you can take it away."

Both of them look at one another, and Elsa swallows once.

"I'm your fairy godmother," she says quietly, _firmly,_ and she gives her own attempt at a smile. "And I'm here to make your dreams come true with a bibbity bobbity boo."

Anna laughs again, and it sags like despair on chains.

:.

Sometimes, Elsa wakes up and the date flickers in and out, April then September then February then August. It always settles down though. Sometimes, she wakes up and the room is silver and then cream and then gray and then ivory, before it shimmers and then turns off-white, like it's meant to be.

Sometimes, Elsa wakes up, and she doesn't know who she is. Sometimes, she wakes up, and she's Jack and Elsa and Rapunzel and the old lady downstairs all mixed up together, and a long time passes before she can grasp her identity again.

But every time Elsa wakes up, Anna is always there. And that's enough for her.

In this reality, Anna is a constant, like mindless and obsessive scheduling was in her last. In this reality, Elsa needs her here, because she's a human anchor to keep her from getting lost in her mind.

So in a way, Elsa isn't really saving Anna from herself. She's using Anna to save herself.

The thought it so horribly greedy that Elsa immediately banishes it, casts it deep into the recesses of her awareness, to let it fester in the darkness, unconstrained, along with any feelings of Jack or her parents or her past life in general, which she's sliced off and hidden away.

However, the human consciousness has a way of pulling things back to the surface. It's cruel, cruel, terrible, and most of all _cruel,_ but it happens. Elsa hates herself for it.

This time, she wakes up to frigid air and stale cupcakes. She's just re-lost Jack all over again, her dreamscape painting a vivid and unreal scenario of her brother's death. She wakes up to frigid air and stale cupcakes and salt water on her lips, and she scrubs at her face before she gets up.

Frosted, heart-shaped and crumbly, the cupcakes sit at her bedside table like sedentary blue guards. Anna had given them to her the day before, but Elsa doesn't eat sweet things. She can't eat it, because it turns into a concoction of regret and agony on her tongue, dashed with a hint of sugar, because she remembers that Jack had a sweet tooth, and Jack is gone, and Elsa doesn't think it's fair that she's allowed to enjoy it when Jack isn't there to enjoy it with her.

She doesn't tell Anna, of course, but accepts them with a tilt of her head and an artificial smile.

"Why?" she had asked.

Anna had shrugged and said, "I made too many."

Now, staring at the cupcakes, Elsa feels bile rise in her throat, and she swipes a pale hand and the treats bounces one, twice, three times, scattering like colorful beads on her cold floorboards.

There's a throbbing pain that shoots through her head, and Elsa staggers to the ground, clutching her forehead between clenched fingers.

Anna's familiar face trembles and it whisks into one that is faceless, covered in a gauzy white mask and stern eyes that glint behind eyeglasses.

_"Brain cancer. A tumor...three years or something left..."_

She doesn't move for a long time.

But when she does, she rises confidently and steps over the remnants of the cupcakes, and begins her day as usual.

* * *

><p><strong>part the third<strong> :: coda

-—

**arc snow.  
><strong>_no, it's nothing wrong with me_

The day before yesterday, four months since Anna moved in and four still since time danced backwards, Elsa kisses her for the very first time.

Right afterwards, Anna pulls away and says, "Don't get attached to me, because I'll be gone tomorrow."

And Elsa pulls the redhead flush against her and murmurs against the hollow of her throat, "I'm not."

:.

_— she wakes up and sees a bright light and it shines down into her eyes and she hears metallic clicking noises she associates with the artificers —_

— put her under _buzzes a voice and she does not see the bright light anymore —_

:.

It's an enticing melody Anna plays that night at the bar. Wisps of smoky piano, and for the first time ever, the hush hush solo of her voice, strong and rich like chocolate and coffee. She glances backwards, gaze flickering towards Elsa who sits at the corner with her long hair down and the corners of her pink lips arching towards the sky.

Afterward, Elsa says, once, "I think I might like you."

There is a laugh, warm and smooth, and Anna replies, "I think I might like you, too."

Nowadays, they spend their time together in Elsa's apartment room. Anna's is too small and too bare for two. Elsa's is not much better, has at least a bed big enough for them both.

They don't do dates, aren't the type for coffee shop romances and cute strolls under a moonlit sky. Instead, they sit on a ground that's ridden with marks and huddle together in a room without heat, watching a marathon of television shows and stuffing themselves with takeout.

It's not the best of relationships, nor probably the healthiest, but they're satisfied, and isn't that enough?

But time goes on, and Anna starts to show signs. Her cheeks are concave, eyes sinking deep into her face. She wears alabaster and icicles on her skin, and her long-limbed grace falters into that of a newborn calf's. One day, when they shower together and steam curls in foggy vines around their bodies, Elsa rests her head on Anna's shoulder and counts the ridges of her spine.

"I've scheduled for a surgery," Anna confesses suddenly, mid-afternoon when they're both sleepily dozing off on Elsa's tiny couch.

"What?" Elsa says, bewildered. "When did this happen? Why didn't you talk to me?"

"It's tomorrow," Anna powers on, "at eleven in the morning."

Speechless, Elsa can only stare at her, eyes wide and mouth trembling.

"I just — this is all so sudden — I don't understand," Elsa stammers. Anna cups her chin with a soft, warm hand, and she just smiles at her, and this time, truly, it's _real._

:.

_— _tell me _they say and they click and metal grates against metal _tell me girl do you know who you are do you know what time it is_ —_

— anna _she says and no she sobs and her eyes roll up and down and everything is shining and brass and there is an explosion of kaleidoscope colors bursting across her fractured vision _anna is here she's here i swear she is where is she i just saw her _she says and shouts and cries and tears are leaking in through the cracks in between her broken words__ —_

_— _put her under_ _buzzes a voice and she does not see the bright light anymore —__

:.

Elsa sits stiffly in a plastic chair and she doesn't remember how she got here, just that she's holding a Styrofoam cup of tea that's been cold for hours, as she waits for Anna's operation to finish. She didn't have enough time to mentally prepare herself, didn't have enough time to ready herself for the possibility that Anna might die, and she'd have to live with that.

Perhaps that's why she didn't tell her, really.

And after the world has ended a million times over, after Armageddon rises and falls like the coils of a spitting cobra, the silence is pierced with the clicking of a nurse's shoes.

"She's okay," the nurse says, and Elsa doesn't hear anything else.

She cries and doesn't stop crying as she clutches Anna's hands with both of her own and thanks a deity she wasn't sure she even believed in anymore.

Anna wakes nearly a day afterwards, and she's dazed by drugs and sleep. Serpentine tubes run around her body. But immediately, when Elsa's exhausted face comes into view, she draws a breath and whispers against her oxygen mask, "You're so beautiful."

Elsa gives the redhead a muffled sob and buries her face into Anna's chest and grips her and never plans on letting her go.

"Looks like you're a pretty good fairy godmother after all," Anna sighs out, and then she drifts off again.

It takes weeks for Anna to completely recover, and she still has chemotherapy sessions to get rid of the last little bit of the tumor left in her brain.

"But they're positive about it," Anna says brightly, a flicker of her old enthusiasm running through shining teal eyes, "so stay strong, okay?"

Elsa nods, and Anna squeezes her lightly.

"You gave me a reason to live," Anna murmurs into her hair, and Elsa freezes. "Before, I really just wanted to die. There was no point in my life. But you helped me so, so, _so_ much."

Elsa's crying. She's really fucking crying. She can feel the tears dripping down her cheeks, running toward the tip of her nose, before they fall like rain and splatter Anna's paper-thin hospital gown. They bloom across the fabric like wet flowers, and Elsa grips Anna for all she's worth and she _sobs._

There's a hand twitching by her side, and Elsa feels bony fingers skim lightly through her hair, and the rasp of Anna's voice reaches her one last time.

"So thank you, Elsa. Thank you. Thank you for everything."

:.

_— this time she sees gunmetal gray as well as brass and there are splotches of fuzziness past the bright light —_

— who are you who are you _they chant and clatter and shake and a hysterical laugh bubbles out past her lips __—_

_— _show her now show her the time frame__ _they say and she struggles __—_

_— _put her under_ _buzzes a voice and she does not see the bright light anymore __—

:.

She's standing in an underground platform, and she isn't sure how she got here. She's in her work clothes, black and gray, like the dirtied keys of a piano. There's something rumbling at the end of the tunnel, and then suddenly there's a mass of people hurrying onto a train that wasn't there before.

Underneath the six o'clock evening rush, Elsa hears the familiar strums of a guitar that drifts lazily in the air. And then suddenly everything clicks into place, and her head whips to the right, as if she knows exactly where she is.

There is a figure crouching on the wall, and she's plucking a cacophony of notes. Chords of minor fifths and perfect fourths and C's and D's and E's sing out like an excruciatingly familiar tune.

A name is on her lips, but as she runs forward, the figure looks up, and the words die away.

What was she about to say? She can't remember.

"Um..." she says. The stranger raises an eyebrow, guitar loose in her grasp.

"Are you okay, ma'am?" the stranger asks. Her voice is wrong, clear but not clear enough, smooth but not smooth like _hers._

"I..." Elsa trails off. "I'm fine, thank you."

She looks down to the phone that she wasn't aware she was holding.

_October 30_ flashes out on her screen.

"Isn't it April?" she asks out loud, but no one answers her.

:.

— this is your last chance girl_ warnings come with metal grating against metal and there are heady screeches through the air_ show us you know where you are_—_

_—_ anna _she says _—__

_— __they chatter and click and laugh metallic and hollow laughs _you are not dreaming_—_

_— _put her under_ _buzzes a voice and she does not see the bright light anymore __—

:.

The ceiling shivers into view. A bare light bulb and ash stains tremble as her eyes struggle to focus. She turns her head to the side and catches sight of a desk that's cluttered with coffee mugs and sheets of paper and dreams that have been neatly placed to the side.

The air whispers around her legs when she slips out of bed, and exhales winter and frozen breaths. Her bare feet hit the cold floorboards with methodical thumps, a soothing melody of monotone beats that grow light and heavy at predictable intervals. They are the toneless crescendos and diminuendos that are hallmarks of her mundane life. The scent of damp, mildewing plaster and last night's dinner fills her nose, but she ignores it as she sets the water to boil and checks her schedule for the day.

_This agenda belongs to: Nobody._

There's a tapping on her door, like the sound a woodpecker might make. Grumbling under her breath, she blindly gropes for the handle and opens it without checking to see who it is.

A woman stands before her, strawberry blonde hair flopping into her eyes and mouth stretched into a wide, easy grin.

For a second, her mind draws a blank. But then, it all comes back to her at once, and she laughs and says, "Good morning, Anna!"

The name slips off her tongue, as if it were always meant to be.

"Morning, Elsa!" Anna chirps. She's holding the morning paper and two croissants in her hands. "Have you made coffee?"

"I just woke up," Elsa groans, but drags herself to the kitchen counter to pull out the coffee beans.

As Anna sets the water to boil, Elsa catches sight of a section of cutout newspaper that's scrunched up between a blue folder and the wall. She doesn't know why, but she smooths it open, and it's yellowing and the ink is fading, but it's still legible.

WOMAN JUMPS OFF BUILDING

She remembers this. It's like a far-off dream, something she _has_ dreamed about, countless times, words spoken to her through a sheet of water. Something cold settles in her bones and it manifests into a type of dread she doesn't know why she's feeling.

Why she's feeling it _now._

_I'm awake,_ she thinks dully, a nagging feeling of unease picking at the edge of her mind. _This can't be happening now. I'm __awake..._

"But — I'm awake," Elsa mutters in confusion, and pinches herself.

The world remains as it is.

"...And time went back..."

"Hm?" Anna peeks over her shoulder, and Elsa quickly flips the paper down.

"Nothing," Elsa says quickly, dread filtering into the spaces in between her words. She's willing her voice to stay even, but it's as if an arctic wind has frozen her joints.

Anna Nystrom, twenty, committed suicide  
>on May 5. She jumped off her apartment building, and died<br>at approximately 9:54 in the morning.

She's been given a second chance to save Anna Nystrom, right?

Elsa turns to look at Anna, who's stirring two mugs of coffee, and then suddenly, there is an inkling, a poisonous thought that appears and consumes her being entirely.

"Anna," she says, quiet and calm. "Are you real?"

Anna pauses and faces her, confusion painted across her features in splashes of pale pearl and thunderclouds. A piano plays softly in the background, and a guitar plucks a triad three times gently in B minor.

She shrugs, turns back to the coffee, and says, "Well, of course I am, Elsa."

Pronouncing her dead:

"I'm part of _you_, aren't I?"

:.

_—_ don't fail _they say_ you are valuable and we would hate to put you down_ _—__

_— she laughs again and it comes out as a sob__—_

_— _put her under_ _buzzes a voice and she does not see the bright light anymore __—

:.

The thing about guilt is that it does strange things to you. Because when Jack Frost committed suicide at the age of eighteen, Elsa was left behind in a world spiraling into darkness. Elsa had nothing to do with his death, nothing at all, but she was his younger sister.

"I should have noticed," Elsa lamented to her grief counselor, every day for a year afterwards.

Her life lost interest, something bright turned into ugly blotches on pulped, soaking paper, and she locked herself up in her room for far too long. It took years of therapy to integrate herself back into society, and even then, Elsa refused social contact.

So when Anna Nystrom moved in next door and Elsa allowed herself to open up after seven years of closure, it was a risk that had disastrous consequences if it backfired.

And it did.

Anna Nystrom killed herself only two months after they met, and Elsa couldn't take it. So in her head, she fashioned herself a new timeline, a new reality where Anna Nystrom didn't really die, and she was given a chance to save her, a chance she never got with Jack.

And she took it.

:.

_—_ foolish girl _buzz creak__ _—__

_— there is no noise_ and she does not see the bright light anymore __—

::

**arc after.  
><strong>_we've been here forever and here's the frozen proof_

Death, Elsa thinks, is a lot like breathing.

She watches through her memories and it plays like something she's viewing through frosted panes of warped glass. One minute, you're drawing in oxygen, sucking in humid summer air and late night soft breezes. The next, with an exhale, gentle as wind shuffling through leaves, there's a hole in the middle of your chest. It leaks with something red and wet and soft, still hot to the touch, while the rest of the body cools down.

Because you're alive, and then suddenly, you're not. It's as easy as breathing, and just as quick.

But then, life is also a lot like smiling. One minute, you're in the worst of moods, because your bus comes late, or you spill a drink down your shirt, or the brother you loved dies before your eyes. But then something happens (a woman appears, strawberry blonde hair and soft hands and eyes of a color that has no name) and suddenly, your day isn't so bad anymore. Suddenly, you're smiling, and you can't even remember why you were sad.

And when she wakes up this time, Anna is curled up next to her, warm and reassuring and _there_.

(She chooses to take it and believe it this time, with all her heart, and pushes everything else from her mind, and she never, _ever_ looks back.)

And while life is certainly not as perfect as the movies suggest, they're both alive _(they're alive, they're alive, they're alive, SHE'S ALIVE)_ and they're both happy.

And that must count for something.

:.

_— _put her down, put her down, she's far gone _a series of buzzes and clicks sound and she hears them through fuzz and cotton and water_ —

— _she's smiling and she drifts off into silky blackness of an endless void —_

_— now sleep._

* * *

><p><strong>the end<strong>

* * *

><p><em>alright, some of you were confused about the ending, so here's the answer to all (or at least most of) your questions, hopefully: <em>**simp. ly/publish/qVDMQ9**._ no spaces._

_all the best._


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